I had fully intended to not enter this Ludum Dare, mostly because I managed to convince myself that I should be doing other things. No idea what those other things were now, but I’ll probably remember them again afterwards.

Anyway, the theme is a bit bland; I decided to make a ‘runner’ game.

Here’s a screenshot:

The game goes on until a certain point, randomly generating platforms (There is one consistent platform at the bottom of the screen). The challenge factor will be the introduction of collectible items and lots of rockets to dodge (Thus the game’s name). I’m intending for there to be a tank or war-machine of some sort at the end that you have to destroy somehow. Still working out the details.

Here it is, a mosaic of Ludum Dare 25 made using all the main screenshot of Ludum Dare’s 25 games. (click on the image for the high resolution)

Like it? What about rate my game? Is free: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=14271

This is my second Ludum Dare, and this time I have managed to actually finish a game, not just abandon one. The game is called Pineapple Dreams—it is my first fast-paced action game. The theme was “You Are the Villain,” so I made something as a tribute to the good old ultra-violence. That said, malchiki and devochki, I give you Pineapple Dreams—go kill yourself some humans now!

I have also discovered that (at least for me) the key to a successful LD48 is no level design and/or artwork/animation, because those things take all the time. Having those time-consuming things out of the way, I managed to compose a tune for this game that I’m rather happy with. I even recorded a couple of sounds and integrated them properly. And I slept two full nights during this LD, which is completely unthinkable.

What a weekend. This is surely the best jam game I ever created. Srsly.

It’s a simple rogue-like, you must stop the adventurer from collecting all the treasures and exploring your lair.

Downloads for Mac, Windows and löve2d.

Added a level, still no actual gameplay…

During the day you can roam free and hurt innocent people

but during the night the heroes come…

2 Thirds October Challenge

At the time of writing this, we are 2/3 of the way through October.

I started developing my game on October 1st and I would say I’m am actually about 2/3 of the way to completing the game.

This is a sort of log of what I went through to get to this stage.

Week 1

Idea

Not much time was spent thinking of an idea. I was determined this time to make a game that I myself want to play even if it was an existing game. With that in mind, I chose the game mechanic (drop7 by Zynga, originally from area/code) and thought about what I’d like it to have to be more appealing to me.

• More colour
• More character
• More particles
• Adventure Mode

The first 3 are just visual things, but they make a difference to the feel of the game and as a graphic designer/illustrator it’s kind of important to me.

Adventure mode: I’ve yet to implement this as I’ve had many many ideas on how to do it. I know how I want the player to feel. I want them to want to progress, to want to beat levels and explore the world I’ll make for the game.

Platform

It’s definitely a mobile game. I intend it to be played in short bursts, 5 minutes here or there. Options:

• iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)
• Android (Phones, Tablets)
• Windows Phone

These were the 3 platforms I was thinking of. I’d love to do a windows phone, but not owning one means testing is just can’t happen.

That leaves iOS and Android. Now, I have a couple of really old iOS devices to play with but developing for iOS will cost me $99. That is $99 I don’t have. So, we’re down to Android, a mere $25.

So I’m developing for Android. That will require me to know Java. Which I don’t know well.

There are a few other options for developing for Android, the 2 I looked at were

• Phone Gap
• Unity

I don’t know Unity and I don’t want to spend too much time learning something new when I only have 1 month to complete my game.

From what I understand about PhoneGap, it throws HTML5/JS into a webkit browser on your phone as if it were it’s own app.

Well, I’m very familiar with javascript, so I’ll give PhoneGap a go. (Spoiler: it doesn’t work out)

Time to get started.

Coding went pretty smooth for my first prototype. I had much of the game working by the end of the week.

The code itself was a huge mess. I was just learning about MVC architecture and attempted to implement it as I went  along. BAD MOVE. The code just got worse and worse and became unworkable.

Week 2

Rebuild!

My code was a mess. At this stage in my life as a game developer, I’ve gotten accustomed to re-writing all my code from scratch and that’s exactly what I did.

I re-coded the whole thing in about a day. It went amazingly well. I changed the grid model from something overcomplicated (list of tile entities) to something super simple (jagged array with integers) and wow was that the best thing I ever did. Coding from here on out was a breeze.

By the end of the week, the game was working and had the added benefit of being able to change the grid size on the fly. I played around with 4-10 grid sizes. Funny thing, 7 grid spaces was the magic number in terms of fun and difficulty.

I tested the game on various browsers and touch device browsers. Turns out Safari is a dick and doesn’t support “.bind()” which a significant part of my event system. That was a pain to sort out, but I ended up adding some code so that it would work on browsers that don’t support it.

Weird thing, the game worked super fast on my old iPad 1 (Safari) but slow on my Nexus S (Chrome). Craziness.

Time to test out Phone Gap. I copied my files over into Eclipse. Tested it. It didn’t work. Crap.

Turns out, requestAnimationFrame won’t work. That’s an easy fix, I switched over to my teeny setTimeout loop.

(function loop(){ setTimeout(function(){update(), draw(), loop()}, 1000/FPS)})();

It is my prototyping game loop. If I have to write something from scratch really quickly, I use this.

Back to the Phone Gap test. It works!

I started working on the graphics, which took no more than an hour or so. (It is my speciality after all).

Coded my new view class and test it.

It works!

but…

slowly.

Well.. that sucked.

I implemented all the performance improving hacks I could think of (FYI working in canvas no CSS3).

• ~~ Double Not. Rounded out all my draws coords (canvas hates decimal numbers)
• Pre-rendering. All my sprites were resized and pre-rendered into their own canvases.
• Non-full screen clearRects. I only re-drew things on the screen that changed.
• Layered Canvas and draws on their own layers. Turns out this actually made things slower despite there being significantly less re-draws.
• Frame skipping. Well.. this really had the same effect, everything was just as choppy as before.

Well, clearly javascript was just not going to cut it.

Now, this isn’t to say PhoneGap is terrible for games (it is), I had right from the very beginning a particle system that I was unwilling to part with. It added some 100+ particles on the screen every time something happened and is the sole reason for laggy perfomance.

oh and I want my game to run at 60 FPS. None of this flimsy 30 FPS.

Week 3

Hey that’s this week!

I decided to re-write the whole thing over in Java.

I knew that the hardest part of this would be getting the thing up and running because really, to me, regardless of the language, all games are the same thing.

• Game Loop
• Game Logic
• Game Rendering

The things that were different were;

• Game Loop Code. Involves pausing threads and what not.
• Event system. Turns out you can’t pass a method reference as an argument. There are work arounds and I ended up passing anonymous functions but I wasn’t happy with it and ended up scrapping my whole event system. I didn’t actually need, it was more a proof of concept.

As for the game logic, it just so happens I write my Javascript like I write my C#/Java. So it was mostly just copying and pasting with some type declarations.

I’ve just finished writing much of the code for rendering/drawing.

It works! and fast! and that’s just in the emulator, on my crappy old phone it’s super awesome.

So that’s where I’m at right now.

Things on my to do list:

• Particle system
• Title Screen
• Score Keeping/Submission
• Implementing ads for free version
• Adventure Mode
• Hats

I expect to have the game ready for submission some time next week. Initial version won’t have adventure mode. It’s not a vital part of the game, just a bit of variety/fun.

So yep, this has been my process for making one of the simplest of simple game development over-complicated.

There should be screenshots of the progress.

Oh and the name of my game will be Panda7.

Please have a look at this gallery from nearly all the entries for the Mini Ludum Dare 37.

Bigger versions of the screenshots and a short summary can be found on my blog:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

I hope you all enjoyed the themes “not-games” and “real real-time” as much as I did. I wanted people to think about the rigid definitions of what games are and if those definitions even are necessary to create interesting and compelling experiences. And yes, most of the entrants succeeded in surprising and entertaining me – for that I want to thank you all, and also for forgiving the somewhat too long theme announcement.

Okay — so got testable play & level prototype earlier:

And have since been working on systems, some of which can be seen here:

Taking a short break now, then it’s on to level progression / load; score increments; general juiciness (inc some more sfx & music), and, er; some basic levels.

G.

Okay, has gameplay. Pretty much.

You can match things up and they create other things.

In fact, you can match up a lot of things.

Possibly too many things. At the moment, chaos is a feature and nothing’s certain. Quite fitting

Also got some basic sfx in. Need and better a gorilla and a two more models. Then onto establishing some objectives. Haven’t decided on the mutants yet, might just go for gene variety, reproduction and, well… a surprise at the end.

G.

Hello fellow Ludum Darers…

At last i find the time to do such a trivial thing as writing a blog post…

Evolution was a hard pick for me…after 2 unsuccessful attempts, i finally narrowed it down to a acceptable game idea.

The first day for me was spend mostly coding ( and doing art when tired of good ol bugs). So far, i can say that i got the basic framework going..and the last 2 days are for levels and polish(and bug squishing of course). But at the moment my game is still all out of colorful blocks.. so i spare you the sight of these thingies and give you the title animation of my game instead.

Click to see animation

next up for me :  sleep

PS: i almost forgot… i am in in the jam that is(although alone … but i need my time to finish)

I will be using xna with a custom ludum proven engine build on top of it. And this time i will hopefully be able to cross-compile for Linux and mac as well.

Our jam entry is going well… We are making a universe evolution game.

Once the map loader is finished we will upload a beta for you to play…

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

This is a team effort by Yuffie (graphics), Jarnik (haXe coding) and automatons atrk&sfxr (sfx, music).

A team of professional thieves – Dino ( camouflage expert ), Fox (lockpick specialist) and Robot (explosives ace) are at your service to perform a perfect theft.

You are in charge of three different thief characters, each having a different field of expertise (camouflage, lockpicking, explosives).
Your goal is to traverse 4 levels without getting caught by guards, get a hold of (yet undefined) artifact and then backtrack through all the levels to the beginning.

Controls: LEFT / RIGHT – walk, UP / DOWN – switch character
The game is now feature complete, more graphics are to be expected in future days as  a post-mortem version.

Okay, so far we have a player in a small cardboard box.

The player can run and jump with arrow keys, and tilt the box with WASD.

Right now we have crap sprites because Ace hasn’t made the sprites yet.

We have music, but we haven’t implemented it yet.

Play it here and comment below:

Previous post here.

My entry for LD22 has been completed and uploaded. Tomorrow I’ll make a full Post Mortem containing a Game Design Document, and my thoughts on what went right, wrong and what could have been done to improve it further. For now, all I can say is the following:

1. I’m proud of my entry. During the past 48 hours the game has gone through allot of design changes. What first started as an FPS, soon became a morph between a Top-down shooter with a capture the flag (briefcase) mode, with American Football elements (such as Touchdown). Only during my second day did I realize that the game was by no mean fun when chased down by an entire team. Writing AI for the team mates was a no-no due to the short amount of time left, so I scraped the basic mechanics and came up with a new one.
2. I’m happy with the current gameplay mechanic. Using a defensive weapon for offense is something not many games tackled, or at least no any that I know off. In this prototype I tackled two ways of using the shield, one in which the player acts a bulldozer, pushing his enemies into pits, and another where the shield is used to deflect bullets towards his attackers.
3. I’m not much of an artist but I feel that the current art style is decent.
4. I’m happy with the amount of features this game contains (although not all are used now). In just 48 hours I managed to integrate a TDS camera (with an alternate FPS version, currently locked), collision, AI (when the prototype was meant as a Capture the Flag game, I implemented two types of behaviour for the enemies: Attackers and defenders. The Attackers charged towards the player if he was near them, while defenders rushed to the touch down zone, forming a human/robot shield) and basic physics.

As I said before, a Post Mortem will arrive soon, in which I will explain how I have arrived to this current gameplay mechanics, what I had to scrap and why. Till then, I’ll leave you guys with today’s Timelapse, and a bunch of screenshoots.

• Screenshot 1 (Main Menu)
• Screenshot 2 (Asian Mode)
• Screenshot 3 (Normal Mode)

Download Cyber Shield.

Hi people! As I approach the end of day one, I thought I’d say hi on the LD blog.

My game is called “Ghost Town” (working title).

I’m tracking progress with Google Plus simply because it’s easy to toss photos and screenshots up there. I’m not really doing major blog posts this time. (Also I shoot random updates on twitter.)

I’m seeing tons of amazing stuff on the LD page, this is incredible.

Good luck to everyone!!

Right then, screenshots. After I wasted some time with that platformer I previously mentioned I’ve went around and started working on one of my original ideas.

What you see here are a bunch of squares. Boy squares and girl squares. They have numbers attached. What these can do is, walk around, kill eachother, breed (like rabbits), and interact with buildings. The buildings are naturally the gray rectangles and the ellipses shall be buttons.

The rectangles on the sides are also buttons.

Now I see a lot of fancy graphics being thrown around without much coding done yet so I figured I upset the balance

There will be alone-ness, and there will be more stuff. I just need to figure out the more stuff part. Maybe some lemmings-like thing. I don’t know.

8 hours in

12 hours in

Yes it doesn’t look like much of a difference, that’s behind the scenes.

An angry mob will always burn. So don’t lose!

I’m very happy to introduce you gLapse 0.2, the visual GNU/Linux tool to take screenshots at fixed intervals and make time lapse videos of your compo progress. If you didn’t knew gLapse you can check out more information about this tool in my first post. At this moment, gLapse is available in English, Spanish and German.

Changelog

• Configurable video quality (very bad, bad, normal, good, best).
• Synchronized screenshots output and video input folders.
• Changes default screenshots output folder.
• Adds German translation (thanks to Superyoshi).
• Improves GUI usability.

Download

• gLapse 0.2 Debian package
• gLapse 0.2 source package

Feedback and new translations are hugely welcome, if you find any problems I would be grateful if yould report them in the issues section. Hope you like it and find it useful for the next compo!

Almost There! All I need to do now is make the music!

Here are a few screen shots:

New apartment, new office-space constructed. You thought it wasn’t ready yet, huh? You thought I wouldn’t have time to hang up the whiteboard in between lab reports?

Secondary (temporary) monitor graciously provided by zDanielz!!!
**Disinterested Cat not included

This weekend, witness the Ludum-power of this fully armed and operational battle-office!!

iħ ∂/∂t |ψ> = H|ψ>